taobao lcd panel made in china

Hi guys, just thought I would share my buying experience on Taobao. Link to the product: Monitor Ordered on 21st and arrived on 29th after combined shipping. Used the official Cainiao service. Chose air option, shipping was around 60SGD.

Specs of the monitor: max 165hz, 1440p 27" LG nano-IPS G-sync compatible panel with 1ms response time. I chose the adjustable stand option which is extra 100RMB over the normal stand. Connectivity-wise you get one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI 2.0 and HDMI 1.4, one DP 1.4 and one audio jack.

The monitor is as stated, which is really good. I"m not a display expert but as far as I could tell there were no dead pixels on mine and no backlight bleed. Claims to be a nano-IPS panel (you can choose the non nano-IPS panel option which is cheaper) and for sure it looks better than my ASUS TN panel.

Read online that these monitors are so cheap because they are grade A- panels that fail to make it to the brand name manufacturers, however I am quite satisfied with the performance of this monitor for the price I paid for it.

Matseng wrote about the Chinese eBay equivalent TaoBao as a great source for cheap electronics components. While the pricing is cheap, the downside is that most sellers only sell locally, so using an agent is a must. Read his full report below.

But if you want really low prices on parts in bulk (or even small) quantities you should have a look at TaoBao.com. They are like a Chinese eBay where you can find electronic parts (and almost anything else) for prices that will amaze you. The site is in Chinese only, but if you’re using Chrome it will automagically translate the pages to a very strange, but somewhat understandable, English. “Item” is translated to “Baby” so the search box says “Looking for what baby?” :-)

These are some of the parts that I’ve just bought from TaoBao. With prices like this it’s easy to order a few hundred, or in case of the switches a few thousands, of them to have a small stock at home in your lab.

For hardware aficionados and Makers, trips to Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei have become something of a pilgrimage. While Huaqiangbei is a tremendous and still active resource, increasingly both Chinese and foreign hardware developers do their sourcing for components on TaoBao. The selection is vastly greater and with delivery times rarely over 48 hours and frequently under 24 hours for local purchases it fits in nicely with the high-speed pace of Shenzhen’s hardware ecosystem.

For overseas buyers, while the cost of Taobao is comparable to, or slightly less than AliExpress and Chinese online stores, the selection is again, many, many times the size. Learning how to effectively source parts from Taobao will be both entertaining and empowering.

You can find nearly anything on TaoBao, if you know the Chinese name for it. This doesn’t mean you need to speak Chinese, but you should understand how it works. While the site can be navigated using Google Translate, it can’t accept English language searches. Figuring out what an object or part is called in Chinese is therefore the first and largest challenge. Once you find that string of characters you don’t need to be able to read it any more than any other snippet of code needs to be human readable in order to be manipulated. So long as you know roughly what the code represents that’s all that you need.

Google Translating “switch” will get you “开关” You can paste that into the TaoBao search field and get a large and somewhat random collection of mostly AC light switches. But if we make the string “开关 DPDT” things start to get more useful. When possible add the numbers for the voltage, amperage etc. required and it will get you a lot closer.

Taobao has a very clever search-by-image function. If you have an image of the part you want you can use that to search. It’s the little camera icon on the right hand side of the search bar.

Unlike Amazon, the “Buy” button on Taobao is more an invitation to chat about buying with the store owner. There’s usually a certain amount of required conversation. Some non-Chinese speakers copy and paste a “sorry I don’t speak Chinese” boilerplate but many stores won’t fulfill an order based on this because they are concerned that miscommunication will lead to a bad review which will cost them more than the profit on the item.

Never ask if it will be ready by a specific date, the answer will almost always be “yes”. There’s nothing much you can do if it’s not, so they have no reason to lose the sale. So when dealing with your TaoBao broker don’t ask “Can they have it ready by Monday?”, instead ask “What day do they say it will be ready?” and you get a much more accurate answer.

The “get it cheaper” part is already done with when you made your choice to use TaoBao instead of a distributor back in the West. Further attempts to save money will result in problems. Everyone on Taobao sources from the same factories, if an identical or very similar product is much cheaper there’s a reason for it. Look at the top five most popular listings for a part, the average price of those or higher is what you can expect to pay.

While there are certainly challenges to sourcing on TaoBao, for any hardware enthusiast the vast, and frequently customizable selection available make it a very useful resource and skill set to have should the need arise.

Taobao (Chinese: 淘宝; simplified Chinese: 淘宝; traditional Chinese: 淘寶; pinyin: Táobǎo) is a Chinese online shopping platform. It is headquartered in Hangzhou and is owned by Alibaba. According to Alexa rank, it is the eighth most-visited website globally in 2021.

Taobao Marketplace facilitates consumer-to-consumer retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores that mainly cater to consumers in Chinese-speaking regions (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) and abroad,

Sellers are able to post goods for sale either through a fixed price or an auction. Auctions make up a small percentage of transactions, whereas the majority of the products are new merchandise sold at fixed prices. Taobao users usually read feedback and compare items from multiple shops. Taobao"s popular payment platform is Alibaba"s Alipay

eBay acquired Eachnet, China"s online auction leader at the time, for US$180 million. It became a major contender in the Chinese consumer e-commerce market.instant messaging for facilitating buyer-seller communication and an escrow-based payment tool: Alipay. Taobao became mainland China"s market leader within two years. Its market share grew from 8% to 59% between 2003 and 2005, while eBay China dropped from 79% to 36%.

In October 2010, Taobao beta-launched eTao as an independent search engine for online shopping to provide and merchant information from a number of major consumer e-commerce websites in China. Online shoppers would be able to use the site to compare prices across sellers. According to the Alibaba Group web site, eTao offers products from Amazon China, Dangdang, Gome, Yihaodian, Nike China and Vancl, as well as Taobao and Tmall.

In June 2011, Jack Ma, executive chairman and former chief executive officer of Alibaba Group, announced that Taobao would split into three different companies: Taobao Marketplace (a consumer-to-consumer platform), Tmall.com (a business-to consumer platform, then called Taobao Mall), and eTao (a search engine for online shopping). The move was said to be necessary for Taobao to “meet competitive threats that emerged in the past two years during which the Internet and e-commerce landscape has changed dramatically.”

On 29 April 2013, Alibaba announced an investment of US$586 million in Sina Weibo. According to Reuters, the deal “should drive more web traffic to Alibaba"s Taobao Marketplace”.

Taobao"s mascot is a dialogue bubble, which represents its corporate culture. Ma introduced Taobao to the outside world by stating, "We are the ant army." Ma once organized more than 2,000 employees to gather at a gymnasium to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the founding ceremony. At the party, Taobao employees waved the Taobao mascot — the flag of "ants." At the end of the celebration that lasted for four hours, all the employees stood hand-in-hand, singing "If you do not experience wind and rain, you cannot see the rainbow. The ants that be organized together can beat the elephant."

A good way to investigate a Taobao shop is by clicking the shop"s rating icon. For Tmall.com shops, people click the stars to view their ratings. Taobao users usually read feedback and compare items from multiple shops.

In March 2010, it introduced the Taobao Data Cube platform, which gives small businesses access to its aggregate consumer transactions data for insight into industry trends.

Launched in 2004, Alipay (simplified Chinese: 支付宝; traditional Chinese: 支付寶; pinyin: Zhīfùbǎo) is an escrow-based online payment platform. It is the preferred payment solution for Taobao Marketplace. It is the most widely used third-party online payment solution in China.

Alipay systems are separate for different groups of users. For instance, Alipay users may send and receive funds if they have an account that have a credit card issued in China, whereas users with other cards may only use Alipay to pay for goods or services from Taobao.

Taobao Marketplace allows buyer and seller to communicate prior to the purchase through its embedded proprietary instant chat program, named AliWangWang (Chinese: 阿里旺旺; pinyin: ĀlǐWàngWàng).

In February 2016, 3 expats living in Shanghai launched Baopals, a shopping platform that translates Taobao and Tmall into English so that foreigners living in China can access of its products and services. Over 2.4 million items have been sold on the platform.

In Dec. 2009, Taobao, together with Hunan TV, set up Happy Taobao, Inc for television shopping. Hunan TV launched an entertainment series called "Happy Taobao", while Taobao Marketplace created channels and independent websites.

Alibaba promotes a new style of live streaming, called cūnbō (村播), that features rural sellers. Taobao has given them their own category in the app, with the purpose of making it easier for these rural sellers to find customers and followers on the platform.

Because of the huge trading volume and income in Singles Day, Taobao launched another promotional activity on December 12 (12/12), drove record trading every year thereafter.

On March 29, 2016, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang pointed out three strategic directions for Taobao: more community-based, more content-enabled, and local adapted.

Taobao extensively uses shopping strategies such as data personalizing, customer loyalties, video broadcasting and the focused demand of a single community to build stages for sellers to display their commodities. It is constructing a new ecosystem from content production, to content propagation, and content consumption with Alibaba"s cooperating internet platforms, including Youku, Weibo, Alimama and Alifilms.

Taobao applies a search tool named "adaptive agents". An adaptive agent picks up signals from consumers’ purchase records, including categories, brands, functions and colors etc.; The search engine involves the scanning of a particular bar code. Taobao tracks customers" purchasing history and reorganizes it into selections that the buyer is likely to be attracted to.

Taobao automatically classifies product text and images and uses tags to match. Semantic search solves the correlation problem that keyword texts cannot solve, such as images, complex texts, and ambiguous texts. Semantic search is a recommendation system that presents customers with similar items that consumers might not find when searching one keyword. Entity tagging and other classifications are used.

In August 2017, the company removed controversial vendors offering personalised messages featuring African children over concerns of child exploitation. Some Chinese Taobao vendors claimed that their promotional videos featuring African children were "charity activity" in which most of the profits goes to the children. However the situation proved more complicated after a photographer contacted by the Beijing Youth Daily said "the children only received snacks or a few dollars as reward", indicating that there was legitimate child exploitation.

In 2019, Taobao removed all items related to the Houston Rockets in response to the organization"s general manager Daryl Morey posting a tweet about Hong Kong.

In October 2020 amid rising geopolitical tensions between Taipei and Beijing, Taobao announced that it would exit the Taiwanese market after the Taiwanese government ordered the company to re-register as being backed by China or to leave the island if they don"t.

The mobile app of Taobao was banned in India (along with other Chinese apps) on 2 September 2020 by the government, the move came amid the 2020 China-India skirmish.

Taobao Marketplace had more than 5 million registered users as of June 2013 and hosted more than 80 million product listings.Alexa"s internet rankings.

After graduating from fashion design institutions, increasing numbers of young Chinese fashion designers are choosing to launch their careers on Alibaba’s consumer-facing marketplace Taobao. According to a new report co-released by Taobao and CBNdata, more than 20 percent of fashion designers currently selling on Taobao have an overseas education. Many of these have graduated from top-tier institutions including Central Saint Martins, London College of Fashion, Bunka Fashion College, and Istituto Marangoni.

China’s young designers are thirsty for a healthy online ecosystem to empower their emerging businesses. Taobao, with its complete trading system and a huge consumer database, provides the support needed to help new designers grow and nurture their brands. The report shows that young designers on the platform have now acquired over 400 million fans with high brand loyalty.

In recent years, affluent young Chinese students have flocked to fashion and art institutes thanks to the support of increasingly wealthy families. However, many of them have trouble finding conventional jobs in the industry after graduation, causing them to consider becoming self-made fashion entrepreneurs. Taobao marketplace offers a chance for them to develop their brands in a mature e-commerce ecosystem.

Taobao Xinxuan (or directly translated as Taobao Selected, 淘宝心选), is scheduled to open its second brick-a-mortar store in Shanghai today, June 28. With a shop-size of 230 meter squares, the store took only 30 days to come to its current shape, from design to product display.

Taobao Xinxuan is both an affiliate shopping channel and product line of Alibaba’s own Taobao. With entry embedded in Taobao, it offers affordable quality lifestyle and functional daily necessity goods including home fragrance, smart power sockets, underwear, and sonic-control toothbrush. An aluminum 26’’ rose gold suitcase, for example, is priced at RMB 404.9 now.

Ironically, backed by China’s e-commerce market leader Alibaba, Taobao Xinxuan is not the first of its kind in China. NetEase Yanxuan (directly translated as NetEase Selected, 网易严选), launched in 2016, is one of the earliest pioneers in the affordable quality product segment in China. Yesterday, during the 1st anniversary of Taobao Xinxuan and its press conference, the Alibaba business’ model was available to the public for the first time.

Tabao Xinxuan says the past year was an internal alpha test (内测). Both the Taobao Xinxuan and NetEase Yanxuan businesses hope by directly connecting with OEMs and ODMs, they can acquire key resources in the design, manufacturing, channel, and consumer segments to create alternative market supplies, and to upgrade consumers’ available shopping options while also offering reasonably priced goods.

Taobao Xinxuan can also be seen as a natural expansion of Alibaba’s power in e-commerce big data and resource allocation. Market research that used to take a few months to complete can now be done in 10 minutes. As algorithms develop and Alibaba’s ecosystem consolidates, calculation of consumer profiles and market preferences are producing more detailed analyses and suggestions to new segments and divisions.

Taobao Xinxuan (or directly translated as Taobao Selected, 淘宝心选), is scheduled to open its second brick-a-mortar store in Shanghai today, June 28. With a shop-size of 230 meter squares, the store took only 30 days to come to its current shape, from design to product display.

Taobao Xinxuan is both an affiliate shopping channel and product line of Alibaba’s own Taobao. With entry embedded in Taobao, it offers affordable quality lifestyle and functional daily necessity goods including home fragrance, smart power sockets, underwear, and sonic-control toothbrush. An aluminum 26’’ rose gold suitcase, for example, is priced at RMB 404.9 now.

Ironically, backed by China’s e-commerce market leader Alibaba, Taobao Xinxuan is not the first of its kind in China. NetEase Yanxuan (directly translated as NetEase Selected, 网易严选), launched in 2016, is one of the earliest pioneers in the affordable quality product segment in China. Yesterday, during the 1st anniversary of Taobao Xinxuan and its press conference, the Alibaba business’ model was available to the public for the first time.

Tabao Xinxuan says the past year was an internal alpha test (内测). Both the Taobao Xinxuan and NetEase Yanxuan businesses hope by directly connecting with OEMs and ODMs, they can acquire key resources in the design, manufacturing, channel, and consumer segments to create alternative market supplies, and to upgrade consumers’ available shopping options while also offering reasonably priced goods.

Taobao Xinxuan can also be seen as a natural expansion of Alibaba’s power in e-commerce big data and resource allocation. Market research that used to take a few months to complete can now be done in 10 minutes. As algorithms develop and Alibaba’s ecosystem consolidates, calculation of consumer profiles and market preferences are producing more detailed analyses and suggestions to new segments and divisions.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s largest e-commerce website, Taobao Marketplace, has signed a pact with the Motion Picture Association (MPA), an affiliate of the Motion Picture Association of America, to curb the sale of counterfeit and copyright-infringing products on the platform.

Under the agreement, Taobao Marketplace and the MPA will cooperate to identify and remove listings for counterfeit goods and those that infringe the copyrights of MPA member companies, both parties said.

China’s Alibaba Group owns Taobao and the deal was signed just ahead of Alibaba’s annual conference this weekend where Michael Ellis, the Asia president of the Motion Picture Association of America, is slated to speak.

Late last year, Alibaba Group’s Taobao unit was put on the United States Trade Representative’s notorious markets list for offering a wide range of copyright-infringing products.

Early this year, China’s Ministry of Commerce protested the move and Alibaba petitioned the USTR to remove Taobao from the list given the platform’s efforts to work with intellectual property rights holders to combat piracy. The USTR has not released an update to its list.

It started life as a C2C (consumer-to-consumer) sales platform, à la Ebay. In fact, Taobao’s launch was a defensive move by Alibaba to safeguard its online dominance against Ebay’s nascent — but still very real — threat.

From my admittedly limited research on the topic, it seems Taobao assumed some key competitive advantages:Price: Ebay charged users in China to list their products. Taobao made listings free to attract users, then monetized the audience through advertising.

Instant payments: Alipay brought online payments to millions of Chinese shoppers in 2004, and was a central component of Taobao’s offering. This was a significant benefit for small businesses, in particular.

Customer service: Taobao, perhaps more than any other individual website, has increased Chinese consumers’ expectations of customer service. Since 2003, it has offered instant communication tools for buyers and sellers.

It would be impossible to isolate just one factor that led to such an ascendancy. Taobao created a range of complementary services, which formed the basis of its own ecosystem.

We are de-sensitized to these kinds of figures these days, but it is telling that Alibaba puts much of its 2019 success down to the arrival of luxury brands on Taobao’s Tmall.

There is increasing demand in China for luxury retail products and there has been for some time. Few would have predicted that Taobao would be the prime beneficiary, however.The CEO of Michael Kors said earlier this year, “Alibaba’s Tmall Luxury Pavilion is the perfect venue for us to communicate Michael Kors’ brand vision.”

Taobao’s live TV feature also allows sellers to turn their living room into their own QVC-style studio. Video has been an important aspect of Taobao’s success this year and most product pages contain at least one mini-movie.

Moreover, Taobao recently opened a “brick-and-mortar retail experience” (formerly known as “a shop”) in Malaysia, following the successful launch of a similar store in Singapore.

It will sell popular, local products, in a similar vein to the Amazon 4-Star stores in the US. There are already a wide range of these stores in China, but Taobao now has its sights set on other Asian markets.

Taobao is now set up to ship groceries, it is courting high-end retail customers, plus it offers sophisticated AI services, cloud computing, and offline stores.

Taobao began its life as an Ebay-style C2C marketplace, it provides lightning-fast customer service, and it takes a more hands-on role on its own platform.

In Alibaba’s case, Pailitao.com has been the focal point of their visual search efforts. While camera-based search has been available on Taobao since 2014, Pailitao has served as a standalone visual search engine.

Result:Can’t really argue with that. After a wait of just four seconds, Taobao has found the same sneakers, in the same color, albeit at wildly different prices of either 999 or 1539 Yuan ($134 or $229).

Compared to Pinterest (the current Loafie Test leader), Taobao fares well when interpreting such a nuanced object. However, there is still room for improvement.

Taobao, the driving force behind Alibaba’s success, offers a visual search experience that helps users find the right items in the world’s biggest store.

In fact, Taobao introduced a “see now, buy now” campaign at Paris Fashion Week 2019, which allowed viewers to shop the runway, quite literally. Just point a camera at the latest fashions and Taobao will direct you to the right Tmall boutique to make the purchase.

Taobao uses these Western fashion shows to promote Chinese designers abroad, too. Known as ‘China Cool’, these events have been hosted in New York and Milan this September.

Its combination of instant customer service, free product listings, and seamless online payments helped establish Taobao’s position as the dominant force in Chinese e-commerce.

Taobao, a popular Chinese online shopping website,is reinventing the ‘Made in China’ tag for Chinese millennials. Long-associated with cheap and shoddily manufactured goods, the e-commerce platform is riding a wave of growing national pride among the post-80s and 90sgeneration by developing products that celebrate craftsmanship on display at China’s greatest museums and cultural institutions. From colorful facial masks using Sichuan Opera Theater of Chengdu designs to matcha cookies shaped like porcelain bowelsin Suzhou Museum’s collection, Taobao is helping create and sell products that are playful, modern and, barring Palace Museum’s calamitouscosmetic line, high-quality.

The days of stale gift shop souvenirs are over. With 48 percent of millennials feeling pride for the ‘Made in China’ label (a 14 percent increase from 2012), this demographic is keen to explore China’s rich heritageby purchasing consumable and wearable goods from the nation’s most storied museums. As a reference point, Beijing’s Palace Museum sold over $147.5 million worth of products in 2017-18. Little wonder Taobao has announced a redoubling of its efforts to expand the goods in this marketplace by pairing cultural institutions with designers and manufacturers in its ecosystem. The plan is to secure 100 additional partners in the next three years and expand into products areas such as food, electronics and home accessories.

“Currently, more than 100 brands on Tmall have established intellectual property partnerships with museums,” said Liu Bo, general manager of Tmall Marketing, Alibaba’s platform of official retailers, on Alizila.com.“Going forward, we will help 10,000 quality brands to do the same, using crossovers to ignite sparks between culture and commerce.” Starting May 29, Taobao has promised to issue new crossover products every week. And if the first round of releases is anything to go by — with pieces from Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, the Great Wall of China, and China’s FAST radio telescope —consumers will have a diversity of choice across a range of cultural touchpoints.

Zheng Zhong, director of Taobao Marketing, told Alizila.com that the company hopes to “use creative imagination to help cultural heritage and national treasures stay relevant in the hearts of consumers. We help them truly become a part of people’s everyday lives, so they can be loved, protected and passed on.”

With 720 million monthly users, Taobao is pitching itself as the number one resource for museums hoping to capitalize on the booming demand for branded cultural products. Indeed, from Alibaba Design’s team of more than 2000 ‘cultural treasure’ designers to its strength in copyright protection to its ability to smartly interpret and deploy, big data the advantages of Internet giant are extensive.

Backed by big data and an e-commerce platform whose 81 anchors drive 100 million daily transactions, museums are now free to creatively reinterpret their collections with the assurance of consumer interest. In the words of Zhang Jintao, the Taobao gift shop becomes the “final exhibition space… we want to allow visitors to enjoy and learn about culture, both while visiting the museum and in the process of shopping.”

We drive through the mist, down a long country road, to reach Peixie. At first sight this remote village seems to have little connection with the 21st-century economy. But step inside the company started by Hua Yongle, on the main street, and you will soon see why it is one of the 20 Taobao villages selected by internet e-commerce giant Alibaba. The firm launched by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma (due to be floated soon on the New York stock exchange) – or more exactly its Taobao subsidiary – has completely changed the face of Peixie.

Like many young Chinese, Hua often made purchases on Taobao, the country’s equivalent of eBay. Four years ago he realised the site’s potential for marketing locally sourced bamboo mats. He reckons he owes a great deal to Ma, who started Alibaba about 15 years ago with a group of friends. It launched as a business-to-business venture enabling companies all over the world to find the right supplier in China. Then in 2003 Ma added Taobao, for consumers.

The benefits of the digital economy are not lost on local officials. Quite simply it has saved the mat factories, first established after the economic reforms of 1993. Finding the right distributors used to be a struggle, but Taobao has changed all that.

Taobao is a Chinese eCommerce website, and it is among the most visited websites in the world. Within it also comprises its payment arm, Alipay. Taobao is part of the Alibaba Group, founded by Chinese tech entrepreneur Jack Ma. The company makes money via its Tmalls (e-commerce platform), and through Alipay, mostly via its Escrow service fees.

Initially, Taobao offered free listings to sellers and increased buyer-seller trust by incorporating Alipay – an escrow-based payment facilitation service. This saw the platformgain significant market share from eBay which was seen as a major competitor at the time.

In 2008, Taobao introduced the B2C platformTaobao Mall (Tmall) to complement its existing C2C offering. Two years later, the online shopping search engine eTao was introduced.

Taobao reacheda a billion product listings by 2016 and on the platform, most products are new and sold at a fixed price, but it does offer eBay-style auctions for some listings.

As noted earlier, Tmall is the B2C arm of Taobao. With over 500 million active users, the platformallows Chinese and international businesses to sell brand-name goods to Chinese citizens.

Taobao makes money here by charging businesses to open a store on the Tmall platform. They must pass a stringent verification process and then pay a commission to Taobao for every subsequent sale. Typically this fee is around 5%.

Escrow provider Alipay also charges for its services on Taobao. Merchants are charged a 0.55% fee for every successful sale. The system is free to use for withdrawals under RMB 20,000 – or approximately 3,000 USD. Above this threshold, users are charged a 0.1% fee.

Compared to rates offered by traditional credit card companies and payment facilitators, Alipay is an extremely attractive option for merchants. At least theoretically, this increases ad revenue for Taobao as sellers compete for that buyer visibility.

Taobao is a Chinese eCommerce site founded by the Alibaba Group in 2003. It was initially created to counter the dominance of eBay in the Chinese market and increase trust between the buyer and the seller.

Taobao sells advertising placements to more than 8 million sellers on its platform. With high competition for visibility, advertising represents a lucrative source of income.

Taobao also charges Chinese and international businesses to open on B2C arm Tmall. After the initial setup fee, Taobao also charges a commission for every sale. Usually, this commission is around 5%. Escrow provider Alipay also charges users for its service. Here, low service fees are in part compensated by the huge volume of transactions on the Taobao platform.

Taobao has teamed up with local retailers to launch a brick-and-mortar, multi-label store to host independent clothing brands that sell on the Alibaba Group-owned online marketplace.

Frequent product reshuffling is only one of the ways that Taostyle is bringing e-commerce shopping experiences offline. Each garment has a unique QR code, which customers can scan with their phones to access its product page on Taobao, find out the price, get detailed product descriptions and customer reviews. The store even allows consumers to place orders online in addition to buying in-store, as it receives the same commission for both online and offline transactions made through Taostyle.

Xia said rich visual content, also a common feature when shopping on Taobao, sets Taostyle apart from traditional stores. Large LED screens showcase featured brands, while across every clothing rack, there are smaller screens for brands to display their product images and videos. Xia also built a booth inside the store, where livestreamers, merchants and Taostyle staff promote and sell their products via livestreaming.

Most of the showcased brands either got their start on Taobao or scaled up thanks to the platform. Taostyle offers them an offline channel to improve the experience for existing fans and reach new customers, as well as the chance to test the waters before committing to their own brick-and-mortar stores, said Xia.

Cathy Xu, founder of indie menswear label THESSNCE, said she wants to leverage Taostyle to reach the brand’s target consumers — men that like high-quality, minimalistic styles — who don’t shop on Taobao that often.

Since I buy stuff occasionally from AliExpress or Taobao for review purposes, I want to share some info that you should know before buying electronics on those e-commerce websites.

The main pro of buying from AliExpress or Taobao to me is the variety of products you can get. You can get some good savings with electronic products as well if you go for less known companies. I"ve read that there are good savings for furniture but I can"t confirm.

Anyway, it would be attractive to buy from AliExpress or Taobao if the savings is 20% or more. For electronics from popular companies, you can get some savings but usually not that much. So it might not be worth the money to import them. But the most important thing is whether you can get system or feature updates.